- Detects the
harmful, invisible, and odorless pollutants inside your home.
- Allowing
you to visualize your overall air quality level through an LED display.
- Foobot's
sensors need 6 days to "warm up" and to be fully accurate.
- Works with
IFTTT, Nest, Ecobee and more, syncs with 120+ connected devices.
Most of us
only hear about the air quality when busy city centers exceed legal limits
But what
about the air you breathe inside your home? There's a growing market of smart
devices that keep tabs to monitor the air inside your home — with some that
react to automatically protect the quality of the air you breathe.This week
it's the turn for Foobot, another app-powered, Alexa-ready air quality monitor
to, hopefully, help you breathe easy. Foobot's design lends itself to being
tidied away into a corner, rather than left more prominently on display, like
Awair.
Foobot
alerts you when a pollution spike occurs
Foobot alerts you when a pollution spike occurs, along with the type of pollutant and how much pollution you’re dealing with. Connect the dots. Have you introduced a new product into your home? A new behavior? Nip it in the bud thanks to Foobot.No need to have a PhD to understand your air. Foobot compiles the data collected from its four sensors.
Then, it assembles an overall score that
reflects the air quality index of your home on a scale from 0 to 100.Foobot
works seamlessly with Google Nest smart thermostats. In most U.S. homes, Nest
connects to the HVAC system. Foobot can then take over the ventilation system
and control airflow renewal based on real-time pollution measurements.
More
functional than fashionable
The device
isn't ugly, but its white finish and slatted design makes the gadget look like
a piece of plumbing, or perhaps an air freshener. Personally, I'm not sold on
the Foobot's looks. However, it is small, compact and can be hidden away if you
don't want the device out on display.
Like Awair,
the companion smartphone app offers much more information than the device
itself. Foobot turns colors depending on the quality of the air: the light is
either blue for good or orange for bad, and how far up the device the light
stretches from its base determines the magnitude of positivity or negativity.
If any one
measure spikes drastically, the app invites you to make a note explaining why
You might
have been cooking, had a lot of people in the same room, or were using cleaning
products nearby. Like Awair, Foobot's app offers tips for improving your air
quality. These serve up fairly obvious advice: Opening your windows when
cooking, or after using cleaning products. These suggestions also seem to have
been done on the cheap — the grammar and punctuation can sometimes be a little
strange. Away from the slightly amateurish-sounding tips, the Foobot's app
interface is clean, attractive and simple enough to navigate, but somehow lacks
some of the Awair's polish.
More advice is offered by Foobot via a free
42-page ebook available on its website
Also like
Awair, Foobot can talk to other smart home gadgets via IFTTT (If This Then
That). Once set up — a matter of creating a free IFTTT account and linking it
to your Footbot account — you can configure the air quality monitor to
automatically flash Philips Hue lights to alert you about degrading air
quality. Foobot can also create a Google spreadsheet to log any spikes in air
quality readings, switch on ventilation via a Nest or Ecobee thermostat, and
activate a Blueair air purifier. More smart home support comes in the form of
Amazon Alexa, which can be paired with the Foobot.
Alexa tried
to use Food Bot
When it worked, the Foobot app would say my air quality was poor/good/great, then add a message like "Have a safe breathing day". I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. If air quality is poor, Alexa will invite to say "tips" which cues her to read a tip from the Foobot app. One of these explains how cooking lowers nearby air quality.
This means you can say to
Alexa: "Ask Foobot about my air quality" or "Ask Foobot about
the air quality in my lounge/kitchen/bedroom" depending on where your
Foobot is placed. This worked most of the time, but Alexa sometimes thought I was
asking about Food Bot, a completely different Alexa Skill available from the
Alexa app.